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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cooters who wrote (2261)	2/4/2000 10:28:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10934

Cooters, NTAP's empiracle reliability numbers and incredible reference accounts usually go a long way to dispel IT management fears when considering filers for mission critical data. Their architecture, for those who delve into it, make it clear why reliability is so high: 1. Drive failures are detected and when those failures are "hard" or soft failure rates reach defined thresholds, hot spares take over. NetApp and the customer are notified of failures via e-mail and blinking lights. 2. Multiple RAID arrays can be defined for a filer so that the likelihood of a two drive failure in a RAID array becomes very, very small. 3. A catastrophic failure (motherboard outage) is 100% recoverable. Because of NetApps unique use of NVRAM and the WAFL architecture, all transactions are recovered and processed at startup, even in an RDBMS-NFS mount environment. 4. Any IT manager who is implementing storage subsystems of ANY architecture will select soft failover configurations for mission critical data (or lose their job). NTAP's clustered configuration provides 100% component backup, including the motherboard, with soft failover, 100% transaction recovery (because the NVRAM's mirror one another in the two systems, and soft fail back transparent to the end users. Also, NetApp's clustered config does NOT require any component to be simply on hot standby. The two systems are both serving the users but will failover to one another when required, including at operator command for servicing of a system. So the incremental cost of a clustered system is near $0, because the capacity of the two systems is always used, except during fail over. 5. NetApp provides at a very low cost, spares kits that are so simple to use, field engineers are hardly ever required. Filers are ergonomically designed for easy access to all components by the customer. The OS provides very specific, easy to understand information about what component failed. And when support is notified of a failure by the customer or by the filer itself, new spares are sent overnight immediately, even before the failed part is returned by the customer. An expensive service force is simply not required by NetApp customers. 6. NetApp does extensive burn in of systems as they are built to order. NetApp's specifications for drive reliability results in a very significant return of drives provided by NetApp suppliers, even though those drives passed the manufacturer's acceptance criteria. What upgrades for motherboard reduncancy are expected? I had not heard about this. Thanks